Was it? So Apple’s lawyers are just idiots? There is a much greater chance that the law was not about gatekeeping or sideloading in general. If there is a clause that simply says that a platform owner can’t restrict apps then they should have put that in there. Apple apparently didn’t find that. Can you? I haven’t sat down and read it myself so I would appreciate being shown where the law addresses gatekeeping.
Edit: OK, the term “gatekeeping” is all over the wiki concerning the DMA. But as is often the case, a term can have different meanings in different legal contexts. In Apple’s case it looks like the DMA was more about Apple opening up the browser, NFC payments, and favoring their own apps in the App Store. I don’t see anything in the Wiki about sideloading as part of being a “gatekeeper.”
Basically, the first point of the summary of what the DMA is for basically invalidates anything Apple is doing:
> Example of the “don'ts” - Gatekeeper platforms may no longer:
> treat services and products offered by the gatekeeper itself more favourably in ranking than similar services or products offered by third parties on the gatekeeper's platform
I find it hard to see what is not 'more favorable' about staying within the walled garden. All their rules are made to terrify people that would step outside it.
I am getting flashbacks to when Google was found to be abusing their monopoly and people went crazy because “Apple is so much worse.” In my brief look at the DMA it looks like Apple was targeted for specific things but sideloading as most people think of it wasn’t one of those things. It’s very possible that Apple has addressed all of the things that were brought to bear on them. It certainly doesn’t seem like the DMA directly addressed sideloading on iOS.
I’ll preface this with saying that this is not a dig at you personally.
That said, when I still practices law, one of the things I hated most were clients who “did their own research”.
If I was lucky they’d at least got a hold of something that tangentially applicable to their situation at hand.
But even in those cases people just seemingly stopped reading once they thought they read something that supported what they wanted.
On that note, your quoted part has a couple of issues. Most important for this debate is that it doesn’t pertain to the topic at hand.
It talked about a gatekeeper favoring itself more in rankings.
So if you search for “Music” in the App Store and Apple shows the Apple Music app before showing Spotify, Deezer, and the like, then this non-legally binding layperson’s explanation of the DMA would apply.
Although even in the case of the example Apple might get away with pointing out that a query for the term “music” is expected to favor results with “music” in their name, but that’s neither here nor there.
I never said that Apple's Lawyers are idiots.
They are probably testing the boundaries.
If they get fined, they will comply, if they get away with this, they will make more money every year
